Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

Love’s Matter: The Material Culture and Art of Affection, 1700–1900

Online and in-person, University of Neuchâtel, 12–13 November 2026

Organized by Henriette Marsden and Lara Pitteloud

This workshop sets out to explore how love—as material culture, social performance, and artistic practice—shaped and was shaped by the material conditions of modernity from the early 18th to the end of the 19th century. The selected papers will explore the aesthetic properties of romantic desire, amicable companionship, familial connection, charitable responsibility, and political allegiance within the context of empire, global trade, and colonialism.

The workshop is organised in the context of the 9th edition of the Entretiens de la Fondation Maison Borel, held by the Institute of Art History and Museology at the University of Neuchâtel. These study days aim to foster the exchange of ideas and perspectives on methodological issues across various disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Registration is not required; join online: https://unine.webex.com/meet/lara.pitteloud

Workshop Conception
• Henriette Marsden (PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge, Newnham College), hm772@cam.ac.uk
• Lara Virginie Pitteloud (PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant, University of Neuchâtel), lara.pitteloud@unine.ch

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9.00  Registration and Coffee

9.30  Henriette Marsden (University of Cambridge) and Lara Pitteloud (University of Neuchâtel) — Introduction

10.00  Keynote Lecture
• Sally Holloway (University of Warwick) — ‘I observed in the midst of the jungle a beautiful column’: Practices of Love and Grief in 18th-Century Britain and India

11.15  Coffee Break

11.30  Panel 1 | Distant Desires: Flirtation, Fantasy, and the Imagined Other
• Silvia Amadori (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) — Intimate Gazes: Erotic Materiality of Lovers’ Eyes
• Sofya Dmitrieva (University of Oxford, Voltaire Foundation) — L’heure du berger: Shepherd Love in 18th-Century Material Culture
• Cynthia Sadler (University of Rostock) — The Bold and the Subtle: Women Loving Women in 18th-Century Paris

13.15  Lunch Break

14.15  Panel 2 | Love Tokens: Gift Exchange, Attachment, and Social Obligation
• Stephanie Koscak (Wake Forest University) — ‘Short of Money’: Coins, Care, and Precarity in 18th-Century London
• Maggie Kalenak (University of Cambridge) — ‘Obsolete lollypops’ and ‘Tassel-trimmed’ Boot Bags: Love Tokens and the Material Culture of 19th-Century English Engagements
• Maya Wassell Smith (Cardiff University, Royal Museums Greenwich) — ‘I Came Home with Lots of Toys’: Sailors, Love, and Coercive Giving

16.30  Demonstration of the ‘Automates Jacquet-Droz’ (for the participants only), Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel (Esplanade Léopold-Robert 1)

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9.45  Panel 3 | Affective Surfaces: Material Interfaces of Feeling
• Eliza Goodpasture (Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford) — To my Friend: The Painted Canvas as a Conduit for Friendship in the Art of Annie Swynnerton and Susan Isabel Dacre
• Dahi Jung (University of Zurich) — Intimate Surfaces: Pith Paper, Touch, and the Making of Love in 19th-Century Britain. The presentation will also include her paper awarded the VKKS/ASHAA Prize

11.15 Award Ceremony of the ‘Prix d’encouragement à la recherche en histoire de l’art 2026’ of the Foundation Alfred Richterich and the Swiss Association of Art Historians

Senior Category – Tactile Knowledge: Crafting Nature with Pith Paper in 19th-Century Women’s Albums in Britain. To be presented together with Dahi Jung’s paper in Panel 3, Dahi Jung (University of Zurich)

Junior Category – The Catalogue as Stand-Alone Exhibition. How Seth Siegelaub Conceives of a New Exhibiting Medium for Conceptual Art, Leo Kaut (University of Basel)

12.00  Apéritif dînatoire (Sponsored by VKKS)

13.30  Panel 4 | Generative Care: Emotional Expression and Artistic Practice
• Federica Vermot (University of Lausanne) — ‘Jusqu’au bout des doigts’: Sculpted Hands as Intimate Portraits
• Marie-Charlotte Lamy (University of Basel) — For the Love of Dog: Picturing Interspecies Companionship
• Linnéa Kluge (Heidelberg University) — ‘I Divided Everything for My Five Children’: Maternal Love and Material Survival in Anna Marie Lieb’s World of Care and Confinement

15.15  Coffee Break

15.30  Panel 5 | Emotional Regimes: Affective Authority, Patriotism and the Rites of Love
• Jakob Spengler (University of Bern) — Learning to Love the Nation? Affective Objects in the Festivals of the Helvetic Republic, 1798–1803
• Javier Sadarangani (University of Bern) — Masculine Friendships among Chilean Politicians: Letters and the Material Practice of Love, 1808–1861
• Moisés Prieto (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) — Love, Longing, and Loyalty: Authoritarian Rule and Material Culture in the Atlantic Space, ca. 1800–1840s

From ArtHist.net and the conference website:

‘Civilizing’ the World: Classicism, Neo-Classical Sculpture, and Plaster Casts in

the Service of Imperial Powers and Post-Colonial Elites, 1780–1945

Online and in-person, Warburg Institute, University of London, 16 and 21–23 October 2026

Organized by Eckart Marchand, Katherine Harloe, and Amy Smith

This conference explores the uses of Greco-Roman and neo-classical sculpture and architecture by European colonial powers to express and consolidate their power, at home and abroad, and the continuation and adaptation of these strategies in elite nation-building in many former colonies, post-independence. Speakers from across the world will discuss the roles classical and neo-classical art fulfilled globally, addressing the deployment of classical visual culture in the service of self-presentation and as a means to dominate indigenous, subaltern and settler populations. Taking in the history of five continents, the conference is designed to bring out historical differences as well as continuities, putting existing, geographically focused approaches and global frameworks of postcolonial analysis to the test.

‘Civilizing’ the World is organized by Dr Eckart Marchand (Warburg Institute), Professor Katherine Harloe (Institute of Classical Studies, University of London), and Professor Amy Smith (Department of Classics, University of Reading). The conference is generously supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, Institute of Classical Studies, John Coffin Memorial Trust, University of Reading Department of Classics and School of Humanities, University of Reading and British Museum Partnership Joint Development Fund, Dino and Raffaello Tomasso, UK, Classics Beyond Borders (University of Cambridge) and the Leventis Foundation, University College London

Booking information is available here»

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Online

10.50  Welcome by Flora Dennis (Deputy Director of the Warburg Institute) and the conference organizers

11.00  Session 1 | The Representation of Imperial Power and its Discontents
Chair: Katherine Harloe
• Polina Malova (4th-year undergraduate, National Research University, Moscow) — Classical Faces of Empire: Rochette and Catherine II’s Southern Program
• Logan Douglas (PhD student, St Andrews) — The Beit Bequest and the Artifice Underpinning Settler Colonialism

12.00  Break

12.10  Session 2 | Classicism in the Philippines and Japan
Chair: Amy Smith
• Geronimo Cristobal (PhD cand, Cornell University) — The Small Museum of Empire: Plaster Casts and Artistic Formation in Colonial Manila
• Shinya Araki (Lecturer, Tama Art University, Japan) — The Uneven Acceptance of Western Art in Different Regions of Japan

13.10  Break

14.00  Session 3 | Representing State and Nation in the Post-Colonial Americas
Chair: Amara Thornton
• Mauricio Oviedo (Ass. Prof., Universidad de Costa Rica and Leonardo Santamaria Montero, PhD cand., Cornell University) — Allegories of America: Indigenous Representation, Transatlantic Artistic Networks, and Nation-Building Narratives in 19th-Century Central America
• Victoria Jiménez (PhD cand., University of Barcelona) — Civilizing through Copies: Classical Replicas, ‘Mamarrachos,’ and the Visual Politics of Nation-Building in 19th-Century Chile

15.00  Break

15.15  Session 4 | Shaping the Citizen and the Other
Chair: Maria Golovteeva
• Joseph Albanese (Ass. Prof., DePauw University, Indiana) — The Seductive Lie of Classical Pagan Sculptures in Colonial Peru
• Katie Margerison (MA, Tulane University) — Moral Bodies, Secular Virtues: Educación Física and the Idealized Citizen in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

16.15  Final Discussion

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Online and in-person, University of London, Senate House

18.00  Welcome — Flora Dennis and Katherine Harloe

18.15  Evening Session | Curatorial Perspectives on Colonial Casts and Mould Taking
Chair: David Saunders
• Eder Ignacio Arreola Ponce (Curator of the Sculpture Collection, Faculty of Art and Design, Academia de San Carlos, UNAM, Mexico City) — Neoclassicism in America: The Sculpture Collection of the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico. History, Provenance, and Tracing of a Dispersed Collection
• Iffat Azeem (Senior Research Officer, Lahore Museum) — An Empirical Curatorial Insight into the Ethnographical Heads of Schlagintweits, 1854–1858
• Veronika Tocha (Curator, Gipsformerei, SMK, Berlin) — Plaster Casting and/as Cultural Appropriation: The Politics of Reproduction

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Online and in-person, University of London

9.40  Welcome and introduction — Bill Sherman (Director of the Warburg Institute) and Eckart Marchand (Warburg Institute)

10.00  Session 1 | Mexico
Chair: Claudia Zehrt
• Daniel Sobrino Ralston (CEEH Associate Curator of Spanish Paintings, National Gallery, London) — ‘Estatua digna del griego afamado’: The Plaster Cast Collection of Mexico City’s Academia de San Carlos, 1783–1803
• Elizabeth Fuentes Rojas (Prof., UNAM, Mexico) — The Continuing Influence of Neoclassicism in Mexican Altarpieces: A Symbiosis of Sculptors and Architects
• Delia Cosentino (Prof., DePaul University Chicago) — ‘Por no ser traidor a su patria’: Tlahuicole and the Making of a Mexican Spartacus

11.15  Coffee

11.45  Session 2 | Central and South Americas
Chair: Rebecca Levitan
• Maite Álvarez (Project Specialist, Getty Research Center, Los Angeles) — Classical Ideals in the Amazon: The Drawing Academy and Artistic Civilization in the Late 18th Century
• Joseph Hartman (Ass. Prof., University of Missouri-Kansas City) — Queen, Poet, Republic: The Classical and Colonial Formations of Cuban National Identity
• Edgar Ulloa (Ass. Prof., Universidad de Costa Rica) — Rethinking Post-Colonial Assumptions: The Plaster Cast Collection of the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Costa Rica, 1897–1940

13.00  Lunch break
With poster session:
• Mauricio Oviedo (Ass. Prof., Universidad de Costa Rica) and Leonardo Santamaria Montero (PhD cand., Cornell University) — Allegories of America: Indigenous Representation, Transatlantic Artistic Networks, and Nation-Building Narratives in 19th-Century Central America

14.30  Session 2 | Central and South Americas
Chair: Vicky Donnellan
• Paul Niell (Prof., Florida State University) — A Rhetoric of Permanence: Neoclassical Urbanism and the Suppression of Ephemeral Architecture in the Spanish Caribbean, 1830–1898
• Fabio D’Almeida Lima Maciel (Prof., UniCamp, São Paulo) — Neo-Classical Sculpture and the Racial Politics of ‘Civilization’ in Ferdinand Pettrich’s The Dying Tecumseh

15.25  Tea and coffee

16.00  Session 3 | Representing the Colonial Power
Chair: John Tresch
• Ciarán Rua O’Neill (Research Fellow, University College Dublin) — Hibernia Improved: Architectural Sculpture, Neoclassicism, and Imperial Authority in Dublin, c. 1780–1810
• Michael Adam Smith (PhD stud., York University) — A ‘Union of Conciliation and Firmness’: John Flaxman’s Monument to Major-General Sir Barry Close

18.00 Visit and Reception, UCL Flaxman Gallery

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Online and in-person, University of London

9.30  Introduction — Amy Smith

9.40  Session 4 | Imperialism in Europe
Chair: Marianna Leszczyk
• Agnieszka Skrodzka (Ass. Prof., Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, Warsaw) — The Clash of Neo-Classicisms: The Sculpture in Warsaw against the Signs of Russian Domination in the Art of the 19th Century
• Jonatan Pérez Mostazo (Prof., University of the Basque Country (EHU) — Civilizing the Inner Barbarians: Classicism, Progress, and Basque Culture in Bilbao, 1875–1931

10.35  Coffee

11.15  Session 5 | Neoclassicism and Anthropology
Chair: Charles Burdett
• Elisabeth Décultot (Prof., Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) — Winckelmann’s Beauty Ideal and the Making of Ethnological Difference around 1800
• Aris Sarafianos (Prof., University of Ioannina) — ‘Neptune’s Breast’ and the ‘Chest’ of Wilson, the Black: Extreme Simulations, Vitality and Race in the Imperial Spectrum – Elgin Casts in Russia, 1818
• Laetitia Lai (PhD stud., Open University of the Netherlands) — Between Art and Anthropological Authenticity: The Visual Languages of Colonial Science
• Nam Huh (PhD stud., University of Loughborough) — From Colonial Life-Casting to Archival Ecology: Technologies of Visibility and Robert Zhao Renhui’s Counter-Archives

13.00  Lunch break

14.15  Session 6 | Colonialism in the Eastern Mediterranean and Africa
Chair: Sam Agbamu
• Gaia De Luca (PostDoc., Lille University) — Conquering through Construction: The Fascist Cultural and Architectural Italianisation in the Dodecanese, 1912–1943
• Khalifa Bashbash (Independent Scholar, Libya) — Archaeology as Imperial Propaganda: The Impact of Italian Colonial and Fascist Ideology on Libyan Antiquities
• Carmen Belmonte (Assistant Professor, University of Padua) — Classicism and Fascist Imperial Power in the Sculpture of Romano Romanelli
• Susan Slyomovics (Distinguished Prof. UCLA) — François-Léon Sicard and ‘Great Men’ Sculptures of French Algeria

16.40  Final Lecture
Chair: Eckart Marchand
• Lorenz Winkler-Horacek (Prof. and Curator of the Plaster Cast Collection, Freie Universität Berlin) — From Prussia to China: On the Appropriation, Rejection, and Re-Appropriation of Classical Antiquity through Plaster Casts

From the PMC:

Drawing as Knowledge: Practice, Theory, and History

Online and in-person, Warburg Institute, London, 16–17 September 2026

A collaboration between the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Warburg Institute, this is a conference about ‘drawing as visual thinking’ within the context of British art history, inspired by the life and work of Deanna Petherbridge (1939–2024).

This conference has been organised to coincide with a display at the Paul Mellon Centre, ‘Just on the Edge’: Exploring the Deanna Petherbridge Archive (29 July – 29 October 2026). Featuring materials from Petherbridge’s archive at the PMC, together with artworks from private collections, a key theme of the display is Petherbridge’s lifelong commitment to the medium of drawing as an active process of knowledge acquisition and formation. Delegates will be given the opportunity to view the display and hear from the curator at PMC on the evening of Wednesday, 15 September. This will be followed by two days of papers and discussion in the Warburg Institute’s Lecture Theatre.

One panel will explore drawing within the practice of a range of British artists, including its function, meaning, and relationship with other media. Another will turn to curators, the role of drawing in their collaborations, and the processes of recording and understanding collections. A number of papers grouped around the theme of ‘intersections’ will explore the interconnectedness of artistic drawing practice with other disciplines, such as mapping and writing. Other talks will be situated between art history and medical humanities, looking at the role of drawing in navigating trauma, mental illness, and bereavement. Two of the panels will range across anatomy, natural history, and empire, exploring drawing as a means of knowing, conceptualising, and mastering the world. Encompassing peoples, lands, flora, and fauna, a key focus will be drawing as a technology of both colonial governance and resistance.

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Paul Mellon Centre

5.30  Drinks Reception
Short talk from Petherbridge display curator, Hannah Jones, and opportunity to see the exhibition

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The Warburg Institute

9.30  Registration and coffee

10.00  Welcome and introduction — Kate Retford, Alixe Bovey, and Flora Dennis

10.30  Panel 1 | Artists’ Practices
• Drawing to Belong: Katerina Wilczynski’s Oxford Portraits — Eliza Goodpastures
• A Rhythm of Thrusts and Curves: Barbara Hepworth’s Drawing in the 1950s — Stephen Feeke
• ‘Straining against the Limits of the Archive’: Drawing as Reimagination — Isabel Seligman

Noon  Lunch

1.15  Panel 2 | Curators’ Practices
• Drawing Sculpture in the British Museum: William Alexander, Henry Corbould, and the Ancient Marbles — Tessa Kilgarriff
• Drawing Curators: Materiality, Communication, Collaboration — Claire Wintle
• Drawing from Art: Copying, Cognition, and Visual Thinking in the Museum — Antje Southern

2.45  Tea and coffee

3.15  Panel 3 | Care
• Mimesis and Memorialisation: ‘Looking After’ in End-of-Life Drawings — Eve Ess
• Commissioned Drawing as an Encounter between Forms of Knowledge — Rose Forshall and Aimee Middlemiss
• Drawn from Experience: Co-Creating Visual Narratives of Illness, Trauma and Healing — Jenny Wright
• Drawing Loneliness and Connection from the Lived Experience of Mental Distress: Findings from a Pilot Study — Louisa Smyllie-Peters and Jo Doll

5.15  Drinks Reception

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The Warburg Institute

9.00  Arrival and registration

9.15  Panel 4 | Resisting Empire
• Drawing Against the Grain: Colonial Plans, Everyday Paper Handling, and the Production of Spatial Knowledge in Colonial Bombay — Excy Hansda
• Iconologies of Line: Visual Thinking, Medium, and Colonial Power in the Daniells’ Drawings of India — Nuno Grancho
• Counter-Cartographies of Dissent: Dhali Al Mamoon’s Drawing against the Colonial Map — Humaira Hossain

10.45  Panel 5 | Travel
• A Cat Called Beef: Exploring the Drawing Practices of British Naval Officers — Katherine Gazzard
• ‘Sketching and Journalising’: Ottoman Encounters in George Scharf’s Travel Sketchbooks — Sebastian Marshall

11.45  Lunch

1.00  Panel 6 | Natural Histories
• The Quick and the Dead: George Stubbs between Drawing and Painting — Michaela Giebelhausen
• Drawn from Nature: Illustrators as Knowledge-makers in 18th-Century British Natural History — Isobel Elstob

2.00  Tea and coffee

2.30  Panel 7 | Intersections
• Only in Drawing: Impossible Objects and the Pre-Disciplinary Sketch — Tal Horesh
• Tracing Musical Logic in the Legacy of Deanna Petherbridge’s The Primacy of Drawing — Jane Alden (online)
• Cartouches and Calligraphy: Gravelot’s Designs for London’s Writing Masters, 1737–40 — Alice Clanachan
• Property Lines: Drawing, Design, and Documentation on the 18th-Century Landed Estate — John Bonehill

4.30  Concluding remarks

From Colonial Williamsburg:

Symposium on Historical Dress | Well Suited: The Work of the Tailor, 1640–1840

Online and in-person, Colonial Williamsburg, 5–7 November 2026

In-person registration due by 16 October; virtual registration due by 7 November

The 2026 symposium, Well Suited, examines the tailor’s trade, convening an international group of historians, curators, tailors, makers, designers, and scholars to explore the history, craft, and cultural significance of tailoring from the eighteenth through nineteenth centuries. Presentations examine military dress, enslaved and working-class clothing, women in the tailoring trade, international fashion exchange, reconstruction methods, and the technical practices of historical garment making, alongside broader themes of identity, labor, and colonialism.

Keynote presentations by Mark Hutter (Master Tailor, Colonial Williamsburg) and Tom Mahon (Tailor and Head Cutter, Redmayne) offer reflections on the evolution of tailor traditions and the enduring role of the tailor’s craft.

Military and martial dress emerge as a major theme throughout the program. Steve Baule examines the role of military tailors in British regiments in colonial America, while Matthew Keagle explores evidence of tailoring practices embedded in eighteenth-century military clothing. Tim Logue traces the influence of Central European Hajduk, Pandour, and Hussar dress on fashionable menswear, and Zack Pinsent investigates the origins, symbolism, reconstruction, and rediscovery of the Windsor Uniform. International and diplomatic wardrobes are further explored by Timothy Long and Gabriella de la Rosa in a new study of George Washington’s black velvet jacket at Sulgrave Manor.

Several presentations examine tailoring within systems of labor, enslavement, and colonial exchange. James J. Broomall considers the relationship between ready-made clothing and slavery in “The Fabric of Enslavement,” while Kathrin Breitt Brown studies garments produced for enslaved workers at Mount Vernon. Laura Beltrán-Rubio reimagines the colonial Andean tailoring trade through Indigenous research methods, and Michael Weil explores tailoring along the Spanish frontier in colonial Texas. Together, these lectures illuminate tailoring’s role within global systems of trade, empire, and labor.

The symposium also highlights tailoring as a deeply personal and local craft shaped by records, surviving garments, and workshop practice. Kirsten Hammerstrom analyzes a Philadelphia tailor’s ledger from 1763 to 1773 to reveal patterns of alteration, repair, and identity formation, while Henry Cooke uses the William Waine papers to reconstruct working-class clothing production and commercial life in colonial Boston. Brenda Rosseau traces three generations of the Figgatt tailoring family across Maryland and Virginia, and Michael Ramsey examines the overlooked business of making Scottish plaiding hose.

Technical reconstruction and experimental making form another important focus of the symposium. Rowan Brenzie reconstructs an 1820s men’s coat to study period drafting systems and fashionable silhouette, while Wilson LeCount and Emma Cross present new research into the construction of leather breeches. Kristen E. Stewart investigates John Randolph’s buckskin breeches, and Margaret Perry with E. Katherine Hargrove reconstruct mid-eighteenth-century orthopedic stays through experimental archaeology and embodied practice.

Questions of gender, fashion communication, and women’s participation in tailoring are addressed in several talks. Chloe Chapin examines nineteenth-century tailor’s plates as tools for advertising and codifying masculinity, while Hannah Rumball-Croft explores tact, touch, and propriety in relationships between male tailors and female clients. Karin J. Bohleke and Nicholas Sekela revisit the career and influence of nineteenth-century tailoress Amanda Jones, whose innovative drafting systems challenged assumptions about women’s labor and authorship within the trade.

Together, these presentations demonstrate the richness of tailoring history as a field that bridges material culture, social history, technical skill, and embodied practice, offering new perspectives on the makers, wearers, and meanings of clothing across the Atlantic world and beyond.